Escort or Prostitute?

Remember when Blair Waldorf befriended an NYU student named Brandeis in season 3 of Gossip Girl? Yes, the one who turned out to be a ‘call girl’. Yes, yes. They did meet in a line at the coffee shop. I know what you’re thinking. Maybe if I rush off to the nearest café with a Valentino 360 bag slung over my shoulder, I too may get noticed by a wealthy fashion heiress who’ll invite me and my buddies to walk in her mother’s fashion show and inadvertently ruin her prospects of expansion. The answer to that is maybe. You just might. In actuality, the process of hiring an escort is more put together and their earnings much higher than you would reckon. It’s how Brandeis paid for ‘college and couture’ and why Blair mistook her for a New York elite in the first place.

To my understanding, the distinguishing factor between an ‘escort’ and a ‘prostitute’ lies in their purpose. Both parties do indeed render services in exchange for money. However, a prostitute by definition has to engage in sexual activity whereas an escort must simply offer up their time and companionship to their client at a specified function. This doesn’t necessarily mean that escorts never get sexually intimate with their clients, but that they are paid for their company more than anything else.

You might think of women on the side of the road at night, dressed in tight clothing and heels almost as long as their nails and think yes, they must be prostitutes. Or look down on the stereotypical young blonde escorts you see on the arms of wealthy old men at galas, brunches and awards ceremonies. One thing to keep in mind, nonetheless, is that this industry is made up of both male and female workers. i.e. male escorts as well as male prostitutes and on the flip side, female clientele. It goes without saying that escorts are trained and better groomed in comparison to prostitutes because a large part of their job has to do with socialising. I can’t speak for your average prostitute, but I do know that a good escort would know to break their bread rather than to go at it with a butter knife when dining with the upper class.

Although a layman may very well regard these two fields of enterprise as one and the same, it is important to note that escorting remains legal in the eyes of the law while prostitution is not. Prostitution is inalienable from the negative stigmas attached to the very word because the collective consciousness refuses to view it as the exercising of (especially) female autonomy or as the basic exchange of money for a service rendered. The slow journey towards the normalisation of sex as a concept and as an act is arguably one of the many reasons why the idea of escorting is so easily swept together with prostitution. Matters pertaining to sex work, no matter how distinct from one another are often grouped under the umbrella term ‘prostitution’ in an effort to shame, confine and make one dimensional. So yeah, I’m all for team Brandeis.

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